It was used by one department who instrumented with DX APM. They used it for regular monitoring and to supply KPI of application services. There is no special business problems to resolve. This team migrated from old CA APM applications to use DX APM. That's why nothing special has been involved.
Pros
Report.
Alerts.
Cons
Availability of KPIs.
Setup custom KPIs.
Notification integration with other software.
Likelihood to Recommend
This is the remaining team that we use DX APM, while most of other applications are instrumented using Dynatrace.
VU
Verified User
Technician in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
DX Application Performance Management is primarily used as a legacy monitoring tool to look at limited metrics which provides a limited perspective on application uptime or health. It is also used to attempt to pinpoint root cause for performance issues. By running performance tests that exhibit performance issues the tool is employed in order to attempt to assess root cause. It’s the tool that everyone begrudgingly has to use and loves to hate.
Pros
Presents real time metrics
Presents real time graphs
Cons
Entire product is cumbersome
Excellent at presenting false positives
Likelihood to Recommend
Any other APM product is vastly superior. This product's interface, lack of automated instrumentation, and just ridiculous false parity with other APM products is the laughing stock of the industry. In our use case, we have no other APM tools so we attempt to use and in 1 case out of 10 did we actually find a reported metric that was actually related to the root cause. We spent four hours parsing metric output graphs and hierarchy trees to find it. If CA is your preferred vendor and you like washing your clothes by hand instead of using an automated appliance then this tool is for you!
Our enterprise monitoring group is piloting CA APM for our most important applications. We have built app specific dashboards that report on the success/failure of the most commonly performed actions. We are using APM to get more accurate and useful data from our most heavily used applications.
Pros
Alerting which can be customized by the end user.
Visualization of the metrics and data presented to provide a unique and attractive interface.
Flexibility to manage actions and commands that we deem important for each application. The ability to define these and customize the metrics reported for each individual application is huge for us.
Cons
The product was overly complex to set up and required a lot of interaction from CA and third-party resources. Make sure you have the appropriate amount of vendor services when you implement the tool.
Support/documentation is also not as available as other products we have used in the past. The user community is not quite as strong either.
Authentication setup was difficult also and took lots of troubleshooting and vendor help to set up.
Likelihood to Recommend
We use APM for application-specific monitoring, initially our high priority apps that are used most heavily. The product is flexible and customizable to set up specific monitoring on each application and alert criteria/thresholds. We have used other tools and considered alternatives, but APM shines in this area.
VU
Verified User
Project Manager in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
We have recommended CA APM to other companies. CA APM has been implemented and supported in my current project for the past 4 years. It is used in banking, POS and HR solutions for the complete project (whole organisation) and not for any specific department.
It does address most of our business requirements.
Pros
CA APM supports .Net and Java applications which are the strong areas of CA APM. It does very well in banking solutions where we are able to meet our business requirements.
Cons
We are facing challenges to meet RFP requirements in few areas where I would recommend CA to improve.
We are facing challenges for non (java and dotnet application) which CA APM does not support. SAP is another solution where CA APM is not able to address our business requirement.
Likelihood to Recommend
CA APM is well suited for Java and .Net technologies but needs to come out of boundaries and support other technologies like non (Java and .Net), SAP solutions etc...In our environment, the tool is not able to meet the 100% requirement as asked by RFP. Maybe you can say it is able to meet 70% of our requirements.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
CA Wily identifies the potential performance problems by analyzing the user transactions when we do performance testing of scalable web apps and thus allows the organization to understand and respond to the end user, which is within organization. It addresses all the performance issues in the configuration of middle ware architecture like connections to the database, active number of threads in the application server, heap usage and memory leak issues.
Pros
Heap Consumption in the Application servers and its traces throughout the test scenarios.
Active number of database connections from application server to the database server.
It provides the CPU usage in the JVM and also provides if all the instances of application server are having load while running the test on the load balancing server.
Traces the active number of threads in each node of application server.
Cons
To kill the thread explicitly in the server as per our need.
To explicitly invoke the garbage collection so as to monitor the load as per our desire.
Sampling frequency to be reduced to get more deterministic of some counters.
Determine the first response byte from the server.
Likelihood to Recommend
CA Wily is well suited for monitoring the load balanced application nodes and determine their main performance bottlenecks like if problem exists in heap or in some connection issues. But I think when it comes to providing the entire report of the application, it is less appropriate as there is no way to create the entire report of the test for all the counters monitored. Also there is no way to detect some issues based on the system configuration.
My organization primarily utilizes CA APM to track the performance of all of our in house java web applications and websites. We us it to gather performance metrics from an Dev App prospective to better understand how our sites and applications are being utilized. So we as a company know what our goals and progress moving forward should be.
Pros
Introscope does a good job of tracking performance of java jvm applications.
CEM does a good job of creating the reports that can be used to track web trends.
Team Center can quickly map out the applications and pin point possible issues and gaps within the monitoring.
Cons
There is a steep learning curve with the tool which can make it at times daunting to use.
APM can at times be fickle with what it can and cannot track as far as performance metrics go.
Other than Team Center, the rest of the pieces of the tool aren't as intuitive and require more time to instrument.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think it does a good job monitoring JVM's but there are other tools that seem easier to use and instrument for .net based applications. Now that all three tools are within the same suite. Hopefully there will be a better console that merges them into one cohesive monitoring application in future releases.
